Friday, January 5, 2018

Sex and Sci-Fi Open My Podcast for 2018.

Lord, have mercy. We made it through 2017. I lost my mother and one of my best friends in New York City within a few months of each other last year, a former reality TV game show host with no previous political experience became President of our United States and....well, you understand. We experienced heartache and pain. Doing a podcast has helped me emotionally and -- if I may be so bold as to write -- artistically. I'm so grateful to my friend and producer Keith Price for coming up with the idea for it and forcing me to commit. We have our first episode of this new year posted, if you'd like to hear it. We talk about plenty. In the movie department, I saw something that was like a great big wet dream of a fantasy romance. THE SHAPE OF WATER is a modern day fable that underscores current issues such as race and immigration. I tell Keith that some folks on social media described it as THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON meets SPLASH. In some ways, that's true. But this new Guillermo del Toro sci-fi movie about the three marginalized people who establish communication with a foreign sea creature in secret U.S. custody is more than that. It's a Resistance drama for today's audiences.

I also talk about CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. Wow. Another love story. This one between two young Jewish American males in the Italian countryside for the summer. This is about the sweet and tart feelings of a first love in one's youth and it's presented with a stylish eroticism.

Keith and I kick off the show by discussing some of the New Year's Eve countdown entertainment that networks gave us. CNN considered Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen to be a festive gay comedy team that we'd love. Ryan Seacrest on ABC hosted Mariah Carey appearing with the twins. Her real life twins. Her two children. Not the twins right below her neck that constantly pop out for attention.

Then I gave a quick year-end review on TCM's presence of African American guest hosts or co-hosts for 2017.

By the way, it's Friday. January 5th. Tonight at 8:00 Eastern, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) is showing Cornel Wilde in the 1966 adventure drama, THE NAKED PREY. Set in the 1800s, a middle-aged colonial white guy leads a safari deep into the African jungle. Drama ensues when the white folks in the safari group disrespect the natives' territory and customs. The pissed off natives kill off the safari party. The middle-aged white guy leader survives by outrunning the young black African warrior men through the jungle.

Personally, I found THE SHAPE OF WATER to be more believable. But that's just me. To hear the podcast, just go here:www.MOCHAA.podomatic.com.

Search This Blog

About Me

The New York Times hailed Bobby Rivers as "a master interviewer with a gift for banter" on his VH1 celebrity talk show in the late 1980s. Bobby Rivers has been a prime time talk show host, an ABC News movie critic and entertainment news contributor, a syndicated game show host and a Food Network host. Whoopi Goldberg picked him to be on her Premiere Radio weekday morning show in 2006. He's acted in national TV commercials and played a recurring comedy character for The Onion. A longtime SAG-AFTRA union member, he's proud to have been the first African-American to get a talk show on VH1 and also to be one of the few black performers who's been a weekly movie critic and film historian on network TV. On VH1, some of his guests were Kirk Douglas, Norman Mailer, Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, Ben Kingsley, Paul McCartney, Carlos Santana, Omar Sharif, Patrick Swayze, Sally Field, cartoon voiceover legend Mel Blanc and Whoopi Goldberg. Bobby Rivers grew up in South Central L.A., graduated from a high school in Watts and got a B.A. from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.